Too human to be female and too female to be human

Lately, I've been watching lots of movies. There are few things better than spending a relaxing night, curled up in a blanket with the boyfriend and a movie. However, it has struck me just how misogynistic our Western culture is. Every movie seems to have someone talking about some woman as a "cunt" or a "whore", so many screenplays feel the need to integrate some type of rape scene. Songs tell girls to "shut your lips, do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips" I've even seen a show that was making fun of porn actresses for wanting more plot in their porn movies so they can actually act, even just a little. This was apparently quite a ridiculous desire because, obviously, any one who becomes a porn actress MUST just be doing it because she so loves to have sex on camera. It couldn't be that at least a significant amount of current porn starts started out dreaming of "real" stardom, could it? Apparently it is completely illegitimate for an impure woman to have a human desire for a respected job.

I am not blaming the media for this. And I don't even think the media is exaggerating the level of misogyny in our culture (at least not by much). More and more, I am becoming convinced that the need to integrate some type of rape scene into such a large amount of movies comes from the fact that rape really is that prevalent. That misogyny really is that prevalent.

I cannot understand why some men hate women so much. Why they debase our sexuality. They love having the sex but apparently still see "pussy" as something bad, gross, and unworthy. You're a cunt, you're a pussy - definitely not compliments.

For one of my assignments at SIM, a professor asked me to research the pro's and con's of post-war justice for violence against women. In doing this research I naturally came across lots of literature dealing with extreme violence against women. Reading about the horrific rapes in the Congo, during the Yugoslavian war, etc., I realized I developed a sort of coping mechanism - I began to view all this violence as "just" random violence. I couldn't see women as pre-picked targets, but rather just people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and who were unlucky enough to come across the maniac person who then raped them. I tried to view it not as an especially horrific crime, but rather just as any other type of assault. I felt that this made it less horrible. If rape is so horrible because it's supposed to make a women impure, it's a "violation" .... then maybe the harm to a women could be mitigated if the women does not accept it as a violation, but rather just the same as if she was punched. Of course, any violence violates a person, but I felt that if we didn't attribute this extra "specialness" to rape, it would take away some of the rapists power and give back some power to the woman.

Then I came across a C.A. MacKinnon article, entitled: "Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace" (4 UCLA Women’s L.J. 59 1993-1994 - I can send you a pdf if your interested). In this article she talks about rape as a war crime, but also as a crime of peace. It is not just something that happens during war, obviously, it happens all the time. Her point is that while it might become more common during war time ... it is already way too common all the time. And rape is not just a random act of violence or even "just" a random act of lust ... it is a hate crime. It is a crime against women. She says, if we replaced the word "woman" with "Jew" everytime a woman was battered or raped, we would see it as what is it - a crime against a specific group of people, a crime against humanity. Yet because it happens to women, "it's either too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too human to be female, or too female to be human". And domestic violence is just too much of a private matter to become a public concern.

MacKinnon continues by explaining that while rape in war can be used as a weapon against a whole ethnic group (so, for instance, by making the women of a group 'impure' so as to ensure no man in that ethnic group will have sex with them, thus decreasing as much as possible the birth rate in that group, or by having soldiers of the "right" ethnicity empregnate women so as to create "pure" babies of that other ethnicity). But - there is another layer - there is also the layer of a war against women that is continuing during the war against the ethnic group. It is intensified by the lawlessness and the chaos ... but it is not new. MacKinnon describes it as "rape of misogyny liberated by xenophobia and unleashed by official command".

Thinking of violence against women in this way is quite disturbing. It means that such violence cannot be reasoned away as random. It must be taken seriously as what it is - an assult against women as a group. We must use this realization to, as a group, work to end this violence. It is a silent war going on all the time ... it is unconscienable to do nothing.